Best Paper – BRIMS 2007

The Simulation Interoperability Standards Organization (SISO), host of the annual Behavior Representation in Modeling & Simulation (BRIMS) conference, announced that an AOS research paper won one of four Best Paper Awards presented at this year’s event, held at the Marriott Waterside. The four winning papers are now featured on the SISO website under the BRIMS Recommended Reading List banner.

The AOS paper, entitled "Modeling Rules of Engagement in Computer Generated Forces", was written by a team led by Dr Rick Evertsz, AOS Melbourne, and presented at the conference by Dr Frank Ritter of Penn State University. The remaining authors were: Simon Russell of QinetiQ Limited (Farnborough, UK) and David Shepherdson (AOS Cambridge).

Abstract

Rules of Engagement (ROE) are driven by a mix of legal, military, and political factors. These dimensions can interact and overlap in subtle ways and must be carefully crafted to be easy to apply in combat situations without jeopardizing mission outcome and the warfighter’s right to self-defense. Although trial and error may have sufficed in the past, the growing complexity of conflicts and the military and political ramifications of ineffective ROE (e.g., a friendly fire incident), make a simulation-based ROE evaluation system a high priority. This paper describes ROE3, a human behavior-modeling tool that supports tactics-independent representation of ROE.

In our approach, ROE are defined as meta-knowledge that act as a constraint on the tactical choices selected by the synthetic entity. This is key to the flexibility of the system — tactics and ROE can be freely mixed and matched to investigate their interactions.